


Born a Different Breed

by letterfromathief



Series: Pop Punk Soulmate Assassins [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 13:47:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3490604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letterfromathief/pseuds/letterfromathief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The words appeared in blue 10 years ago, and she isn’t thinking of them when she breaks into his house. It’s only supposed to be a recruitment, not a lifetime commitment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Born a Different Breed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [niniadepapa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/niniadepapa/gifts).



> Soul Mate AU where you wake up on your 18th birthday with the first words your soulmate will say tattooed on your body, and somehow also an Assassins AU. For Nini, who asked for this half a year ago. I always deliver…eventually! And of course, many, many thanks to Jude and Alison for reading this over for me.

**Beginning of Beginnings**

Admittedly, these are not the circumstances she would’ve liked to have met him under.

But when the words had appeared 10 years ago, scrawled across the meat of her thigh in deep, dark blue sweeping curves that crisscrossed the old scars, Emma knew that moment that not-completely catastrophic-and-fucked-up-beyond-all-repair was the best she could realistically expect.

Expect, not _hope_ for. She never entertained any hopes about this meeting, except the few times when even work wasn’t enough to distract her from her reality and she would glare at those lines, still as dark as ever, and hope that she would never even meet him, her, them at all.

“Stop or I’ll shoot, and I promise I won’t miss,” his voice, raspy with sleep, had rung out only moments before. The threat was solid though. Graham Humbert was not only the Sheriff of this small, boring hamlet, he was also an expert marksman, ranked number 7 and number 9 in the country for long range and short range, respectively. In certain circles – _Emma’s_ circles – he was ranked much higher than that.

He clicked on the light then, and Emma knew she was well and truly fucked.

“Turn around,” he says in that same raspy voice – and Emma reconsiders the sleep part of the equation because she recognizes the short breaths and slight grit to his words.

It’s the same way she speaks when she’s decided to move in for the kill.

A ball lodges itself in the pit of her stomach. There is only one way that she’s getting out of this encounter alive.

In the trashy Harlequins and even trashier drugstore thrillers that she devours while waiting at airports, in cars, at diners and, too often enough, while waiting behind jail bars, this is the moment when the protagonist’s heart will “beat so loud in my chest that I fear it will escape right through my mouth the moment I speak,” but it’s _excitement_ and _happiness_ that make the words pour from their mouths in a breathless stumbling stream. Emma supposes that the inevitability of whatever you say being correct is what makes it exciting

For her, that’s what makes it so damn terrifying.

Heart beating at a pace that would put rave music to shame, Emma turns ever so slowly.

“I’m loath to shoot a woman in the back,” he says when she is facing him.

Given any other occasion, Emma would’ve snorted at the attempt to be gentlemanly while he was holding a gun aimed at her chest because on any other occasion, Emma would’ve had one aimed right back at him.

Maybe at his temple, where his hair dark hair curls over sweaty skin. Or at his bared chest, at the same spot he’s aiming at her – right at his heart.

Or she could aim it at his hip, right where the almost pale green writing threads its way down beneath his black joggers.

She draws her eyes back to his face. His eyes are a dark blue, almost black. She knew that already.

Emma bites her tongue to stop the thoughts of _idiot, dumb, fuck_ before they become distractions but she doesn’t lose eye contact with him.

Another beat passes and he says, “No last words then?”

She could say it. Whatever it is she’s supposed to say to him, she could say it right now.

But that’s not going to guarantee her survival.

He pulls the trigger and Emma drops to the ground. She does a full body roll through the open doorway before his next bullet can tear a hole in her. She barely sees where she’s going as she races through the backdoor and hops the fence to her waiting car, and when she speeds down the streets, it’s on auto-pilot.

When she pulls over outside the rendezvous joint, she can still see nothing but the way he looked that split second before he pulled the trigger with a single tear sliding down his cheek.

\---

**Hunter to Hunted**

She takes to rubbing her thigh all the time. The skin feels stretched, aching, but not in a way that she can identify as some kind of symptom.

There are plenty of books she can read or websites she can visit, or hell, since Snow and her Prince are back in town, she could ask them. Is this normal? How do you get rid of it? _Can_ I get rid of it?

That would mean acknowledging the fact that this might be all in her head. It would also mean alerting the Queen to her latest… _interest_ , and she was already suspicious enough of Emma’s explanation that she wasn’t able to get a word in edge-wise before he started, guns blazing. The Queen had smiled with the understanding she was so well-known for among her select few, but the short pause before she advised Emma to lay low for a while wasn’t a vote of confidence.

In fact, since laying low meant Emma loitering at one of the Queen’s safe houses, it meant more “stay within sight” – sight being the cameras Emma knew for a fact to be stationed all over the building. She’d checked for them thoroughly when she first arrived a decade ago and offered a grim smile to the one in her bedroom as she thought moodily, _“nothing like trading a cage for a cage._ ”

Moody distrustful teenage Emma, aside, the tattoo starts to itch something painful while she stays in that room. As careful as she used to be about making sure no one saw, even when she was locked behind bars, sharing a cell with Mandy, the nosy redhead, Emma throws caution to the wind, stripping down to her underwear so she can finger the lines on her skin.

She makes sure to do the same to the other thigh too, pulling a weird stretch. Just in case someone is watching.

There’s nothing different about the tat. The words are still as deep and dark and blue as they have always been, but she sees it differently now. She doesn’t feel the fear – or the anger – because she faced those words and she survived. Now, all Emma can see is the blue of his eyes. She can’t tell if the colour is off, if she’s remembering correctly or not, even with the pictures taped to the wall of _Recruit: Humbert_. Pictures distort. Pictures lie. Just like her memories.

It’s day 3 of this nonsense that the ache and itch turns into a burn and she jumps in the shower, desperate to somehow ease it.

It crosses her mind what Hook would say if she voiced that thought to him and she frowns at herself and at this imagined him. Hook, an innuendo addicted nuisance even in her mind.

The cold water doesn’t cool it down. The hot water doesn’t distract her from it. She feels grumpy and annoyed when she steps out the shower and heads to the bedroom to get dressed.

She feels much the same when she sees him already there, seated on her bed.

“Well.”

He looks at her and then frowns uncomfortably, clasping his empty hands together.

 _Well_ , Emma thinks too because the burning in her thigh has ceased. It’s as if they were playing some weird variation of Hot and Cold and she just won, or he did, or they both lost.

“Shouldn’t you ask why I’m here? Demand to know how I found you?”

In lieu of laughing out loud at the absurdity of her doing either of those things, Emma raises an eyebrow and gives him her best bemused look.

“So, we’re still not on speaking terms, then.” He shakes his head sadly and drops his shoulders like he’s genuinely disappointed.

The silence gives her a moment to realize her hair is dripping down her back and water is turning icy. She shivers.

When he lifts his eyes, her next look is a pointed one.

“Ah, I’ll just let you get dressed then.”

He’s still staring a moment later and the urge to make a smart remark is far too strong. Emma bites her lip and because they’re both staring so intently, she notices the way his eyes widen.

The burn comes back, just for a second, and then it’s gone as he clears his throat and says. “Right. Leaving.”

She just now sees the duffle bag he hoists over his shoulder when he stands up from the bed. At the question in her eyes, he says, “Had to clear the room. You know, safety first.”

That brings a smile to her lips though it shouldn’t. _If_ he did a good job, and she knows he did. The wall’s still up there, his mistakes filling up only two sheets of paper, a record that only the Beast and the Warrior have beaten. Emma has three pages and growing.

Her thigh itches again when he finally turns to the door and leaves the room.

_Three pages and growing, and growing._

\---

**Her Majesty’s Decree**

Her hair is still damp when she leaves the room and she shivers at the chill. Sheriff Humbert smiles warmly at her when she joins him, with his hand resting comfortably on his pistol.

It is an unneeded gesture. Standing by his other side is the Queen herself, looking positively radiant in the glow of the noonday sun. She’d wanted all her buildings to let in as many of its rays as possible and her cousin had delivered, knowing her talents would be appreciated. Emma doesn’t even think about pulling out the gun from where it’s holstered within her leather jacket.

“It’s a lovely day,” the Queen announces.

Emma pretends that she is imagining the way she lingered on ‘love.’ When that thought proves worse than the alternative, Emma just nods her head.

“The sheriff here has agreed to join with us.”

Emma wants to ask just _how_ she’d convinced him – those are her favorite stories that on those few occasions when they are all together like one big, murderous family, they rehash again and again because the Queen is _something else_ when she wants to be. Unearthly in her ways of persuasion.

Emma is silent. She knows the Queen wants a response but even with Graham recruited, project complete and being within the safety of the Queen’s presence, where the only death to be meted out would be by her hand, Emma simply cannot speak.

 _Is it fear of falling?_ Hook would say that.

He’d also press his fingertips beneath hers so she could see his tattoo, his second of three, but the only one given to him by choice. Her name is emblazoned on his arm in colours as bright as the day he got it and kept that way by the woman whose first words circled his forearm in happy clean orange lines that read, “I’m here to save you.” Emma would always understand his meaning but what was the point in wishing on an improbability when her soulmate was supposed to try to kill her? If anything she’d end up a tattoo on this soulmates’ arm.

She never voiced this. He didn’t deserve it, even when she wanted to tear his hair out for bringing a sword to a gunfight. He’d watched Raiders of the Lost Ark twice in a row and still hadn’t learned the lesson.

Her bitterness is hers and hers alone.

Her fear apparently now a shared experience as words cling to her throat.

The Queen fills the silence with the sound of birds singing. Graham gives Emma a look as she answers the phone and steps away to speak quietly on the call. Emma just smiles.

“I have a job for you. If you’re willing.”

Emma nods quickly. This whole business would be much easier to put behind her if she was focused on a job.

Graham is nodding as well, and Emma only realizes this in growing horror – and excitement? She feels lightheaded from time to time when she hasn’t eaten, but the flutters in her head and chest aren’t those – when the Queen clasps her hands together with a brilliant smile and says, “That’s wonderful. And to think I thought this would take some coaxing. Especially with Graham so newly joined and you, Emma, so recently, ah, staggered.”

Emma frowns to keep from exclaiming a word. She knows she can speak, even in his presence, if she isn’t speaking to him. But it’s a risk.

As is this trip, but when all is said (not by Emma of course) and done, she and Graham are packed into his car back to his hometown to face his soon to be former boss.

\---

**Perhaps You’ve Got A Friend In Me**

He doesn’t seem to mind that she doesn’t speak. He can hold whole conversations on his own and does it so well that Emma ends up smiling at him in more goofy, growing fondness than she would like.

“I’m sorry for trying to kill you,” is the first thing he says when they’re at mile one of their journey. Only one mile into their very long journey. She wouldn’t have chosen to go by car because _it’s_ a 20 hour drive, but the skies are being watched – by who, Emma doesn’t know but she trusts the Queen. The last time someone didn’t heed the Queen, she ended up trying to kill Snow and the Prince.

And she’s still trying to, if their weariness is anything to go by.

Emma shrugs her shoulders. She isn’t sure what she’s trying to get across, that it was nothing, that it’s water under the bridge, or that he didn’t even do a good job of it.

“I hope you don’t judge me by my quickness to draw. The Mayor’s had me on edge for quite some time. I assumed that you breaking into my house was her attempt to take me out. I was only trying to survive.”

Emma had been leaning against the car door, but at his words she sits up straighter and frowns at him.

“Ah, that came out quite heartless. I apologize for that. I swear I have a heart. I can prove it.”

He taps his hand to his chest and Emma raises an eyebrow at him when he glances over at her with a smile. “It’s beating. It’s real.”

 _You can be heartless with a heart,_ Emma would normally say. But then, not voicing that quick remark allows her to look at him and remember the tear streaking his cheek when he shot at her.

He’s right. Sheriff, sharp shooter, and now an assassin – he was all of those things, but he definitely was not heartless.

Considering it longer, the thought makes her hands duck nervously into her pockets.

 She’s glad when he changes the topic and starts talking about the repairs he was going to get done in his house after shooting his own bullets through it. Luckily for him, he hadn’t had to account for the spent cartridges because he used his own gun. Also, luckily his cabin in the woods meant no one came looking for him after the bullets were spent.

“No one comes looking for me anyway. Except you. You know, most people just call.”

His grin is happy and so amused with himself that Emma shakes her head, the slight huff of breath and shaking of her chest her only concession to his really bad joke.

“But I suppose that wouldn’t work out for you. Yes, it is better that you came. Although, again, sorry for trying to kill you.”

She reaches out and pats him on the shoulder, just to get him to stop. He’s warm, underneath the plain cotton shirt. And kind of sticky. Georgia weather is hell on earth this time of year.

“Sorry,” he says again.

Emma places her head on the dashboard, head in her hands. His laugh echoes in their small car. It’s nice, better than the local stations.

(Maybe even better than Shang’s playlist, and she’d chosen the songs specifically with Emma in mind. “A good use of her criminal profiler background if there ever was one,” the Warrior had teased – less the Warrior and more Mulan. Shang had nodded just because she was always at a loss for words around Mulan.

Emma had ached at the scene. Even with no words written on their skin, they’d found each other. _Her_ words had brought her nothing but grief. She’d wanted to scrub them from her skin and forget they were ever there.)

She rubs her thigh gently and as Graham talks some more, she falls asleep to the cadence of his voice. It’s a particularly gruff lullaby, but warm like the sun pressing on the window panes, so it gets the job done.

She wakes up hours later, maybe. It’s dark and she has no idea where she is except that Graham has pulled over at a gas station and nudged her awake. Amazingly, she didn’t reach for her weapon, but just his offered hand as he helps her out the car. There’s a crick in her neck and she needs to pee badly.

She opens her mouth to ask him if he wants anything from the store but closes her mouth when she remembers.

Her heartbeat thrums wildly in her chest, fear closing up her throat.

She doesn’t think he notices but she gathers herself quickly and points at the gas station store. He smiles at her so warmly she’s taken aback for a moment. And again her thigh burns, white hot. If she hadn’t been leaning on the car, she’d have stumbled.

“Get me whatever you get.”

Emma shrugs and then as quickly as she can without looking like she’s doing the Pee Run, she extricates herself from his company.

If only that helped at all. Instead after using the surprisingly clean bathroom, she ends up roaming the little store for something he might like.

Something they could share.

She grabs two waters and the two bear claws, still warm like they’ve just come out the toaster oven, and pays. Graham is leaning against the car, eagerly awaiting her choice if his excited tapping of his fingers on the hood is anything to go by.

“Smells like…”

Emma waits.

His smile is wide as he says, “Bear claws. Good choice.”

She shrugs demurely, but the skipping of her heart is hard to ignore.

Back on the road, Graham is quiet as he munches on the bear claw. Emma finishes hers first and goes to steal his. Their fingers touch like some kind of movie moment, except worse because she knows she’s read this in one of the _better_ thrillers. It’s actually one of her favorites.

At least, Emma’s fingers are sticky with icing and not the guts of an ancient beast. It’s the little things that count.

Graham is the first to pull back, and Emma finds herself disappointed. Even more so when he lets her finish it without another word. In fact, the quiet lasts for an hour. It’s not tense, not at all, and that’s what makes it worse. Like there was a moment and it was gone.

 _You could bring it back_.

Her lips tremble with words but still they don’t come.

Graham finally speaks, long after Emma has resigned herself to silence once again. “So, apparently we all get code names. She said I could choose my own if I wanted, or you could choose it for me?”

It’s a suggestion she can’t allow herself to give. She thinks about how easily he found her and how it’s less the work of a Sheriff but more akin to a bounty hunter.

She wants to call him the Huntsman.

Ruby would like that. Ruby would like _him_. But she would especially like being able to tease him about the Huntsman being unable to hunt down “this Beast.” She’d use her Frat Bro voice too. Emma would laugh and steal food from Beauty’s plate, who would pretend to be too into her and Ruby’s off-site database to notice.

Emma’s thigh aches again, but her chest aches more. She can’t breathe for a moment and some instinct tells her to look up, where she sees only that deep blue in the rearview mirror.

_It is the same colour._

The thought calms her in a way that she can’t explain. He smiles at her through the mirror and then his eyes turn back to the road.

“I can’t wait to hear what you come up with,” he says.

He sounds so certain.

Emma rubs her thigh.

\---

**Is it Love, That I’m Dreaming Of**

12 hours and a little over half the journey done, Emma nudges him in the side and points to the off-road motels.

“We have a timeline,” he murmurs.

Emma nudges him harder.

“Alright then,” he says. His laugh is low, tired. She isn’t going to face off with this Mayor with her backup dead on his feet.

Graham checks into the rinky-dink motel and Emma makes sure her and his guns are loaded before she meets him at his room door.

She’s sticky from the Southern sun, so she jumps in the shower. Her fingers brush over the words rhythmically. She knows the shape of the raised skin by heart, and can write the words in the exact handwriting herself. She’ll never admit how long she spent trying to transcribe it perfectly.

She’ll never admit that as perfect as she got it, it still wasn’t _perfect._

Not, apparently, without the man snoring in the next room.

The thought of Graham – his eyes, the warmth of his hand, his laugh and his smile – has her tracing her fingers lower, curving them towards herself.

She gasps when her fingers brush her clit and then has to make conscious, deliberate choice not to make a sound. Like when she was younger, afraid that someone would catch her – even when she was on her own with no one to catch her.

Neal taught her how to make a sound. He taught her other things too.

Betrayal. Loss. Heartbreak.

She pulls her fingers away and like so many times before, scrubs at the words on her thigh, blinded by the water and her tears, but still she can see the blue, just as distinct as ever.

When she leaves the shower, she ends up laughing at her reflection in the mirror. Graham is still snoring, so she feels safe doing this, laughing at the fact that as many tears as she just cried, she didn’t make a sound.

Another thing Neal taught her while she sat in jail for his crime. Where the Queen found her and taught her how to put those skills to use.

She steps into the semi-darkened room only to realize there’s only one bed. Most of the time she doesn’t mind. Wouldn’t mind at all, really, if it were anyone else. Even if it was the King himself, though she wouldn’t want to deal with him or the Queen afterwards. His awkwardness was only made worse by her sincerity.

That would be a discomfort. This, however, is a nightmare.

But she bears with it, crawling underneath the covers that he himself chose not to lie beneath and pulling her pillow away from him and towards the edge of the bed.

He’s warm, even with the distance between them, and she supposes that’s what wakes her up only a few hours later, with the sunlight peeking in the sky. She’s too hot and in trying to roll away, she ends up nearly rolling off the bed. Except he catches her before she hits the ground, pulls her back up and towards him.

They’re too close for anything else but this to happen, her kissing him, eyes wide open to memorize the shades of blue in his gaze as well as she memorized the ones of her tattoo. At the edges she sees the blue from the ‘oo’ and near the center, the blue of ‘stop or.’

What she feels is too much to memorize. His lips are dry but they still feel…so _perfect_. As does the hand he threads through her hair to curl around the back of her neck. The other is pressed between them with her hand.

It’s too fast, she knows this.

She’s not ready, she knows this.

So, she doesn’t do what the blood rushing loudly through her head demands of her, and only slides her hand down the front of his sweats to glide over his hard length.

Graham groans into her mouth, kisses her harder. His fingers tap against her belly, asking permission. She gives it with a thrust of her hips and soon his fingers are thrumming her clit in rhythm to her strokes.

She comes before he does, with a harsh gasp that she breaks their kiss to let out. Her eyes closed sometime during their prolonged make out, but they’re blown open by her orgasm. His are closed still, his brow wrinkled with exertion.

His lips are too red. Emma wants to kiss him again. Her body aches all over except her thigh. That burns instead, but it’s not painful or distracting, just warmth flooding her veins.

She gets him off in 3 quick strokes, lets him kiss her forehead and murmur unintelligibly into her hairline while she wipes his release on his stomach.

“Thanks for that,” he says sarcastically when he gets his voice back.

Emma nods briefly. The smile comes so easily.

The words would too but – it’s too fast, she’s not ready.

So she points at the alarm clock behind him instead and while he’s figuring out what she means, she races to the bathroom before him.

Two showers in one day, and she hasn’t even killed anyone yet.

\---

**End of Ends**

His conversation during the last hours of the drive is sporadic at best. Emma feels a weight in her stomach, but not because of him – it’s how she always feels before a kill.

It’s not excitement nor is it trepidation. She feels no joy in killing, and she can sense Graham feels the same. Her hand rests on his thigh all the way up to his cabin in the woods.

They don’t need to go in to know someone’s been there.

She wants to ask him if he had anything important in there, but he has the wires fried and the house set ablaze before she thinks to herself that she would hope her first words weren’t that awful.

_“Hey Sheriff, need anything inside before we burn down your house?”_

She’s imagining first words. She hasn’t done that in years.

The sidelong glance she tries to give him is ruined by the fact that he is already looking at her. His eyes crinkle in a soft smile as they climb back in the car.

“We got 30 minutes now to get this done. The rest of the department will be up here dealing with this, so even if Mayor Mills has a chance to hit her emergency call button, we’ll still have time to get in and out.”

Storybrooke, Maine doesn’t have many side roads, but the forest route has no traffic lights so they get to the Mayor’s house in record time.

They say no words as they park in the back, outside of view of the security cameras. Emma because she doesn’t want her first words to possibly be a goodbye.

She doesn’t know why Graham is quiet but he does press his hand to her neck for a comforting moment before he gets his gun. Emma already has hers loaded and ready to go, so she relishes the short time the warmth remains, the ghost of his hand on her.

Breaking in is easy when you already have a key. Sneaking is something Emma got good at when she was younger, and Graham is as much of a huntsman as Emma thought, quiet, careful and deadly.

His shotgun blast would’ve taken Mayor Cora Mills head off if it was her seated at her desk.

Instead it tears right through the high-tech hologram and her designer chair just as a whistling sound tears through the room and Graham pushes her back against the wall.

She knows that he’s been hit before she even realizes she is on the floor, gun in hand and aiming where the shot came from.

Mills walks out of the pitch darkness and Emma would’ve taken the shot instantly had Regina not followed behind her.

Regina, who was supposed to be holed up somewhere in France.

Regina, who has her sword in hand, gaze firmly on Graham’s bleeding form, while Cora’s gun points directly at Emma.

Emma breathes. She can’t die yet, not while her words are still just on Graham’s hip. She can’t leave it unsaid.

Somehow, that blind faith leads her right because there is no chance for monologue or explanations or _dying_ , when Charming and Snow come barreling through the door, Snow’s bow aimed at Cora and shooting blazing holes in the tacky wallpaper and Charming pushing Regina back, blow after blow so Emma can crawl over to where Graham lies, bleeding out.

“Graham, please. Don’t you dare die on me,” she says, staunching the flow of blood with her hands. “Don’t you dare.”

She forgets that she’s not supposed to be speaking. She forgets it’s too fast, that she’s not ready.

She is less ready to see him die than she is to see him live, _here_ , with her.

Mary and David are by her side only moments later. The Mayor and her Regal Pawn are gone and Graham is leaving too, his breath too shallow, the blood too puddled on the floor.

They lift him to the car together. He’s in the hospital only ten minutes later, but Emma’s covered in blood and she can’t think of a cover story so she has to wait in the car while Mary works the hospital staff like the fabled royalty she was nicknamed for.

She doesn’t quite recall how she gets through the next couple of hours or the next 2 days for that matter, when she isn’t allowed to look in on him even though the Queen, through her ways, has him and Emma, Mary, and David transferred to one of her bases in Haven.

What Emma does recall is the Queen’s phone call, and the way it breathes life into her like sunshine on flowers.

Emma would not call it a conversation because she does not speak, but the Queen sings a little, a melody like rebirth, the first flower buds after a very cold winter. At last, when she speaks, she just says, “It’s not his time yet.”

She hangs up then. Or Emma does.

It doesn’t matter because the next day, she drives to see him.

Still not technically allowed, but the doctors here are a little more lax. Especially when Emma flashes her gun, emblazoned with the Queen’s symbol, the pomegranate etched into the barrel.

Graham’s asleep and Emma struggles to stop herself. She loses the battle only after ten minutes and lifts the sheet to look at his hip.

She supposes hope was something she should never have put her faith in. Because where his name and Emma’s cried out ‘ _please_ ’ should be is instead, “You’ll be coming home with me.”

Emma has had her heartbroken before. She knows what that feels like.

This is worse.

Her soul feels broken.

He’s still asleep when she pulls back and numbly takes the steps out of the room. He’s still asleep when she makes it halfway down the hall.

But as she reaches the stairs his voice calls out her name, loudly, _plaintively._

She doesn’t even try to resist.

When she comes back in the room, his eyes are open, but where the blue once frightened, angered, and excited her, now they just look like drowning pools.

“Emma,” he says hoarsely.

“Did you know?” she asks.

Why her voice sounds even rougher than his is no mystery. The words hurt like she hasn’t spoken for years. It was barely 3 days.

He looks confused. The surprise isn’t there though. _Question answered._

“You let me believe – and then you just –”

She has to stop to breathe. He keeps blinking at her dumbly, the confusion still in his eyes and she lashes out with her hurt and all the broken, shattered pieces of her soul.

“You were wrong. You _are_ heartless.”

She thinks then that she can leave but –

“You were singing in your sleep. Just before we got to that gas station in North Carolina. And when I tried to wake you, without opening your eyes, you turned to me and sang, ‘You’ll be coming home to me.’”

He coughs and it turns into a laugh. Because Emma seems to have lost her voice for real this time, she stands there, rooted to the spot, while he drinks the glass of water on his table.

“If this is your idea of home, uh, I’m not sure this is going to work out,” he says.

Emma wants to punch him.

She wants to kiss him.

She chooses the latter.

**Author's Note:**

> The Queen and King are OUAT-inspired versions of Persephone and Hades. In this AU, I pictured them as Lupita Nyong'o and Idris Elba.
> 
>  _Killian's tattoos are as follows:_ Milah's first words written on the small of his back, her name (the same tattoo as in canon), and Aurora's first words curled around his arms.
> 
>  
> 
> _Other ships/characters as follows:_
> 
>  
> 
> Beauty and the Beast as Belle/Ruby  
> Shang and the Warrior as obvs fem!Shang/Mulan; Shang as played by Claudia Kim  
> and obviously Snowing


End file.
